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Dissertations / Theses on the topic 'American literature Literature, Comparative Literature, Comparative'
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1
Gullo, Frank. "Wide awake in America: The emergence and dissolution of American ceremonial rites of passage." Thesis, University of Ottawa (Canada), 1996. http://hdl.handle.net/10393/9598.
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This thesis purports to delineate and offer conclusions about a wide range of American "coming of age" texts. Traditional, New Historicist, and Sociological research methodologies all served as points of departure for the definition of terms, selection of evidence, and specific thesis arguments. The thesis is organized into four chapters. The first chapter discusses the genre characteristics and tradition of the European bildungsroman, and the thematic and stylistic departure of its American "coming of age" counterpart. The second chapter considers cultural and anthropological studies of boyhood in non-Western societies in order to determine the extent to which rites of passage and "coming of age" studies are universal. The third and fourth chapters both present close readings of specific American "coming of age" texts: chapter three foregrounds the indissoluble relationship between an American boy's coming of age and the natural world, and chapter four focuses on the dissolution of the American wilderness, the resultant urban alternative, and the subsequent maturity of the boy without access to a natural world in which to perform traditional rites of passage. The thesis speculates on the possibilities of replacing the neutral matrix of the natural world with some other template that engenders moral growth. The thesis concludes with a consideration of cyberspace as a new, egalitarian neutral matrix from which we can potentially create new rites of passage, and return to liberating basics.
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Metz-Cherne, Emily. "Inconceivable Saviors| Indigeneity and Childhood in U.S. and Andean Literature." Thesis, University of Pittsburgh, 2013. http://pqdtopen.proquest.com/#viewpdf?dispub=3573262.
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<p> This dissertation explores the question of indigenous development and its literary representation through an investigation of depictions of growth in novels from the United States and Peru where boys mature, perhaps, into men. I find that texts with adolescent characters intimately connected to indigenous communities challenge western concepts of maturity and development as presented in the traditional <i>Bildungsroman</i>. Specifically, I read José María Arguedas’s <i>Los ríos profundo </i>s (1958) and Sherman Alexie’s <i>Flight</i> (2007) as parodies of the genre that call into question the allegory of a western civilizing mission with its lineal trajectory of growth in which the indigenous is relegated to an uncivilized time before modernity. I describe the protagonists of these novels as inconceivable saviors; inconceivable in that the West cannot imagine them, as indigenous, to be the saviors of the nation (i.e., its protectors and reproducers). They are border-thinkers who live in-between epistemological spaces and the stories of their lives serve as kinds of border-<i> Bildungsromane</i>, narratives of growth that arise in the blurred time/space of a border culture, or Bil(<i>dung</i>)sroman, stories of the abject or expelled. Arguedas’s and Alexie’s narratives confront the issue of race, a problem that allegories of the consolidation and development of the nation (e.g., <i>Bildungsroman</i> and foundational fictions) evade through magical means by turning the form into a fetish and presenting fetishized fetal origins that offer reassurances of legitimacy for the western narrative of modernity and the nation-state. That is, the traditional form acts like a talisman that magically disappears the fragmentation of coloniality by providing a history to hold on to, creating an origin that does not really exist. Instead of conforming to the model of the genre or rejecting it, Arguedas’s and Alexie’s texts yield to the power of the original form, appearing to tell the familiar story while carrying a subversive message. Their power derives from the uncertainty inherent in this mimesis. In this way, these novels encourage readers to question the maturation process as conceived and represented in the west and in western literature and to consider alternative paths and formations of self.</p>
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Kattemalavadi, Chinmayi. "(An) Unsettled Commons| Narrative and Trauma after 9/11." Thesis, Wayne State University, 2017. http://pqdtopen.proquest.com/#viewpdf?dispub=10261366.
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<p> This dissertation examines fictional responses to the events of September 11, 2001. It argues for the importance of one kind of fictional response, one which focuses on representing the feeling of "unsettledness" that can be one effect of trauma, with the aim of making that unsettledness itself a locus of a shared common experience. I posit that in articulating the events of 9/11 in the context of, in relation to, and as one in a series of traumas, violences, and histories, these narratives make the unsettlements shareable. Focusing on four works of fiction that were published after 9/11—Joseph O’Neill’s <i>Netherland</i>, Junot Díaz’s <i> The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao (Oscar Wao)</i>, Teju Cole’s <i> Open City</i>, and Jennifer Egan’s <i>A Visit From the Goon Squad (Goon Squad)</i>—I explore representations of the effects of and the attempts to cope with traumatic experiences including 9/11 itself.</p><p>
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Idini, Antonio Giovanni 1958. "Detecting colonialism: Detective fiction in Native American and Sardinian literatures." Diss., The University of Arizona, 1998. http://hdl.handle.net/10150/282702.
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This dissertation compares Native American and Sardinian literatures, focussing on literary renditions of detective stories, a recent development which has occurred in both literatures. The study is based on Procedura (1988), and Il terzo suono (1995), by Sardinian author Salvatore Mannuzzu; The Sharpest Sight (1992), Bone Game (1994), and Nightland (1996) by Choctaw-Cherokee-Irish writer Louis Owens. In both literatures the use of detective fiction embodies the authors' commentary regarding the discourse on colonization. Recurrent thematic features are the concern with history, notably the history of domination and the processes that have led to the present post-colonial condition. The drive towards solving the crime symbolizes and comments upon the necessity of addressing the history of colonization, past and present, both of the land and its people. All the novels included in this study elaborate the basic features of the genre in innovative ways that offer significant commentaries on the condition of these two colonized peoples. The truth at the end of the narration is broken down to a multiplicity of competing narratives. The dispossession and exploitation of ancestral land are textually structured as crimes which further parallel and comment upon the murder of human beings. Also, the characters of the detectives are pivotal for the embodiment of a critique of the classic anthropological model. The gathering of data in order to offer a 'scientific' version of the truth is an endeavor shared by criminal investigators as well as anthropologists, ethnologists and archaeologists. Since classic detective fiction and modern science developed simultaneously around the middle of nineteenth century, it is not coincidental that post-colonial authors of detective fiction feel the necessity to address the self-appointed superiority of so-called scientific discourse. As both cultures have been commodified as objects to be studied by external social scientists, Mannuzzu's and Owens's refusal to depict a univocal solution is also indicative of the clash between definitions elaborated by outsiders versus forms of traditional knowledge within the cultural group.
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Rezek, Joseph Paul. "Tales from elsewhere fiction at a proximate distance in the anglophone Atlantic /." Diss., Restricted to subscribing institutions, 2009. http://proquest.umi.com/pqdweb?did=1925765691&sid=1&Fmt=2&clientId=1564&RQT=309&VName=PQD.
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James, Jessica. "CTRL-ALT-DELETE." Thesis, California State University, Long Beach, 2013. http://pqdtopen.proquest.com/#viewpdf?dispub=1523196.
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<p> This thesis examines concepts of control, alternation, and deletion (CTRL, ALT, DELETE) through the poetic process. By examining some of the specific poems presented here, one can see the effects of literary and social critics including Michel Foucault, Hart Crane, and Adrienne Rich on my poetry. Thematically, structurally, and linguistically, the poems in this thesis address contemporary concerns and ask the reader to face the challenges of postmillennial life with creativity, empathy, and humor.</p>
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Ouellet, Annie, and Raymond Carver. "Veux-tu te taire, s'il te plat? : critique de la traduction de Carver." Thesis, McGill University, 1999. http://digitool.Library.McGill.CA:80/R/?func=dbin-jump-full&object_id=30196.
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Among the different theories of translation, the work of critic Antoine Berman is most remarkable. In Pour une critique des traductions: John Donne, published in 1994, Berman suggests, in the segment entitled "Le projet d'une critique 'productive'", a critical method of translation that is not a "model", but a possible analytical process. By following the steps devised by Berman, we will endeavor to apply this method to a translation of several short stories by the American writer Raymond Carver, chosen from the collection Will You Please Be Quiet Please?, first published by McGraw-Hill in 1976. The work has only been translated into French once, by Francois Lasquin in 1987. Our analysis will be based on this version.<br>The creative component of our Master's Thesis will consist in a new translated versions of the selected short stories from Carver's collection, namely: Fat, They're Not Your Husband, Are You A Doctor?, Nobody Said Anything, Night School, The Student's Wife and Bicycles, Muscles, Cigarets .<br>Subsequent to the applications of the possible analytical process , we will compare the version presented in the first part of this Thesis with Francois Lasquin's, using the tools proposed by Berman. This comparison will be based on the deformation tendencies theory found in Berman's essay: "La traduction et la lettre ou l'auberge du lointain", published in 1985 in les tours de babel. Finally, we will re-emphasize the recurrent changes suggested in the version we are presenting. This analysis leads us to a discussion of our own conceptions of translation, and the elements that motivate and justify our choices concerning translation and translating.
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Kang, Meekyung Yoon. "Emerson and Melville: "A correspondent coloring"." Diss., The University of Arizona, 1999. http://hdl.handle.net/10150/288970.
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This study examines Emerson's influence on Melville's works from Mardi through The Confidence-Man. Each work demonstrates Melville's deep concern and keen interest in Emerson's optimistic idealism and transcendentalism and documents his changing attitude toward key Emersonian concepts. Melville questions and interprets Emerson's ideas of self-reliance and subjectivity and explores in detail Emerson's way of seeing nature and the world. Since Emerson's epistemology and ontology are epitomized in the images of "eye" and "star," Melville utilizes these images to express his response to and interpretation of Emerson. In this process he suggests the ways in which both men were geniuses of their times and possessed "a correspondent coloring." As generations of critics have noticed, Emerson's influence on Melville's work is prominent and pervasive, but it is also, at times implicit and ambiguous. In my reading of the novels, I explore the way in which Melville at once acknowledges Emerson's influence and calls a number of his crucial concepts into question. Central here are Emerson's theories of seeing and reading, problems of perception and interpretation. Though Melville agrees with Emerson's idea of the world as "an open book" or a text, he is suspicious of reading that book, for, as Melville understands it, nature is indecipherable or inscrutable. As a creative reader and a creative writer, Melville devotes his career to an attempt to write the great American work that Emerson had called for in the "American Scholar." Each of the novels I examine embodies Melville's careful and close reading and critical interpretation of Emerson and his works. Since Melville recognized Emerson as an "uncommon man" and a "great man," he was attracted to his ideas and his works. However, as his career developed, he became more and more aware of what he had called Emerson's "gaping flaw," and that flaw for Melville involved Emerson's influence on the current literary culture as well as Emerson's ideas as such. By the time of The Confidence-Man he had lost his faith in Emerson and the literary world he had come to represent.
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Leggette, Amy. "Scenes, Seasons, and Spaces: Textual Modes of Address in Modern French, American, and Russian Literature." Thesis, University of Oregon, 2015. http://hdl.handle.net/1794/19274.
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This dissertation examines how literary form adapts to emergent print environments by identifying common strategies for incorporating the act of reading into the situation of the text. In my analysis of original textual forms, I investigate the material specificity of constitutively modern practices of reading and subjectivity, focusing on how innovative publications structure these practices by involving the reader in the process of production. This project assembles six pioneering writers across literary traditions, genres, and periods, from the 1830s to the 1910s, in three chapter pairings: novelistic episodes of Honoré de Balzac’s Comédie humaine and prose poems of Charles Baudelaire’s Spleen de Paris in nineteenth-century Parisian periodicals; the prose poetry books, Une saison en enfer by Arthur Rimbaud and Spring and All by William Carlos Williams; and genre-bending texts from the œuvres of Stéphane Mallarmé and Vladimir Mayakovsky, including the typographically irregular page spreads of Un coup de dés jamais n’abolira le hasard and Vladimir Mayakovsky: A Tragedy (Vladimir Maiakovskii: Tragediia). My discussion locates reflexive conceptions of modern literature in constructions of the reading subject, while extending the performative framework of textual modes of address to new media and digital technologies—social interfaces that mediate subjectivity by structuring practices of reading.
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Su, Genxing. "The seduction of culture: Representation and self-fashioning in Anglo-American popular culture." Diss., The University of Arizona, 2001. http://hdl.handle.net/10150/290379.
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One important means by which a society maintains and reproduces its dominant ideology is through cultural seductions. By creating in its viewers/readers a good feeling about themselves and the world they live in, popular culture entices individuals into approving of, supporting and embracing the dominant social, political and economic orders of our world. What Louis Althusser calls ideological "interpellation," therefore, is frequently a form of seduction involving the use of sweeteners that render certain values, beliefs and social positions enticing and attractive. Among such seducers are money, women (sexual pleasure), fear, an illusion of power and the semblance of dissent/rebelliousness, many of which are, or are generated by the representation of, the cultural and political "others" of the West. At the same time, the reproduction and maintenance of the dominant orders in the West, to which these "others" make no insignificant contributions, ultimately reinforce their subordinate and underprivileged statuses. Driving such illusion-based ideological seductions are capitalism and its colossal culture industry--a symbol of the postmodern convergence of the cultural, ideological and the economic--whose insatiable desire for profit casts the "others" of the West into the vicious circle of mis-representation and domination.
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Mejia, Melinda. "Reading home from exile| Narratives of belonging in Western literature." Thesis, State University of New York at Buffalo, 2014. http://pqdtopen.proquest.com/#viewpdf?dispub=3629800.
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<p> <i>Reading Home from Exile: Narratives of Belonging in Western Literature </i> analyzes the way in which narratives of belonging arise from Western literary works that have been largely read as works of exile. This dissertation insists on the importance of the concept of home even in the light of much of the theoretical criticism produced in the last fifty years which turns to concepts that emphasize movement, rootlessness, homelessness, and difference. Through readings of Western literature spanning from canonical ancient Greek texts to Mexican novels of the revolution and to Chicano/a literature, this study shows that literature continues to dwell on the question of home and that much of the literature of exile is an attempt to narrate home. Beginning with a close reading of <i>Oedipus the King</i> and <i>Oedipus at Colonus,</i> the first chapter discusses Oedipus's various moments of exile and the different spheres of belonging (biological/familial, social, political) that emerge through a close reading of these moments of exile. Chapter 2 examines these same categories of belonging in Mauricio Magdaleno's <i> El resplandor,</i> an <i>indigenista</i> novel set in post-revolutionary Mexico about the trials and tribulations of the Otomi town of San Andres. Chapter 3 continues to consider literature that takes Revolutionary and post-revolutionary Mexico as setting and analyzes the narratives of belonging that arise in Juan Rulfo's <i>Pedro Páramo</i> and Elena Garro's <i>Recollections of Things to Come.</i> Finally, Chapter 4 analyzes the emergence of these categories of home in Chicano/a literature and thought, focusing on Gloria Anzaldua's<i> Borderlands/La Frontera</i> and its relation to Homi Bhabha's concept of hybridity and to postcolonial theory in general. </p>
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Thompson, Ruthe Marie 1957. "Working mother: The birth of the subject in the novel." Diss., The University of Arizona, 1997. http://hdl.handle.net/10150/288733.
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One of the primary objectives of the realist novel has been to imitate the linguistic processes that assert and maintain the idea of a coherent identity. In Working Mother: The Birth of the Subject in the Novel, I present a developmental view of the birth of the subject as articulated by some of the architects of the novel. In an examination of James and Henry Austen's Loiterer, Jane Austen's Pride and Prejudice, Harriet Beecher Stowe's Uncle Tom's Cabin, and Henry James' Washington Square, I locate and analyze narrative sites that mirror, presage, and/or encourage the production of readerly subjectivity across the body of a female or feminized figure, usually a mother. I employ a psychoanalytic and semiotic point of view to demonstrate the mother's role in narrative subject formation via the process of "suture." Margaret Homans, Christine Boheemen, and others have argued that the novel--and indeed all of Western culture--depends upon the repression of the mother. In Homan's useful formulation "the mother's absence is what makes possible and makes necessary the central projects of our culture." Active subjugation, incorporation, and disavowal of the maternal--ejecting the mother from the story, separating her from the protagonist, and from the reader--enable subjects to be produced in the novel form. Aggressivity as well as narcissism, disavowal as well as incorporation, help to jettison the originary feminine from the novel, leaving an absent space in which the subject can enunciate.
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Ritchie, Amanda Ross. "Margaret Fuller and the politics of German sensibility." Diss., The University of Arizona, 2000. http://hdl.handle.net/10150/289215.
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This study seeks to accomplish two goals. First, it will reestablish Margaret Fuller (1810-1850) as America's first important interpreter of Johann Wolfgang Goethe (1749-1832), Germany's best-known lyric poet. The study includes full transcription and complete annotation of Fuller's Reading Journal O manuscript detailing the experimental series of Conversations on Goethe that Fuller conducted in the spring or summer of 1839. The manuscript suggests that Fuller was an expert on all of Goethe's works, not just on his literary oeuvre. The experimental series of Conversations on Goethe was a prototype for the Boston Conversations for Women, those watershed events in the history of the American women's movement that Fuller envisioned and then carried out between the fall of 1839, and the winter of 1844. Second, this study will examine Fuller's debt to German sensibility as she found it in Goethe and other German writers of the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. Fuller learned Innerlichkeit, inwardness, and Gelassenheit, or serenity, from her long study of German letters. Her incorporation of German sensibility was useful to her in two ways. First, German sensibility was important to Fuller's unique pedagogical philosophy. By encouraging her students to practice German sensibility, Fuller taught them how to educate themselves through their own initiatives. Second, German sensibility facilitated Fuller's critical stance, thereby aiding in the development of her feminism. Fuller's discussion of Iphigenia, the heroine of Goethe's classical play called Iphigenia at Tauris, displays the extent of her reliance on German sensibility in creating her most insightful feminist writings. Fuller wrote about Goethe's Iphigenia in the July 1841 issue of the transcendentalist journal called the Dial. Her remarks a there prove that her feminism was fully developed two years before she wrote "The Great Lawsuit: Man vs. Men, Woman vs. Women," the essay she expanded and later published as Woman in the Nineteenth Century.
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Rojcewicz, Stephen J. "Our tears| Thornton Wilder's reception and Americanization of the Latin and Greek classics." Thesis, University of Maryland, College Park, 2017. http://pqdtopen.proquest.com/#viewpdf?dispub=10260313.
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<p> I argue in this dissertation that Thornton Wilder is a <i>poeta doctus</i>, a learned playwright and novelist, who consciously places himself within the classical tradition, creating works that assimilate Greek and Latin literature, transforming our understanding of the classics through the intertextual aspects of his writings. Never slavishly following his ancient models, Wilder grapples with classical literature not only through his fiction set in ancient times but also throughout his literary output, integrating classical influences with biblical, medieval, Renaissance, early modern, and modern sources. In particular, Wilder dramatizes the Americanization of these influences, fulfilling what he describes in an early newspaper interview as the mission of the American writer: merging classical works with the American spirit. </p><p> Through close reading; examination of manuscript drafts, journal entries, and correspondence; and philological analysis, I explore Wilder’s development of classical motifs, including the female sage, the torch race of literature, the Homeric hero, and the spread of manure. Wilder’s first published novel, <i>The Cabala</i>, demonstrates his identification with Vergil as the Latin poet’s American successor. Drawing on feminist scholarship, I investigate the role of female sages in Wilder’s novels and plays, including the example of Emily Dickinson. <i>The Skin of Our Teeth</i> exemplifies Wilder’s metaphor of literature as a “Torch Race,” based on Lucretius and Plato: literature is a relay race involving the cooperation of numerous peoples and cultures, rather than a purely competitive endeavor. </p><p> Vergil’s expression, <i>sunt lacrimae rerum et mentem mortalia tangunt</i> [Here are the tears of the world, and human matters touch the heart] (Vergil: <i>Aeneid</i> 1.462), haunts much of Wilder’s oeuvre. The phrase <i>lacrimae rerum</i> is multivocal, so that the reader must interpret it. Understanding <i>lacrimae rerum</i> as “tears for the beauty of the world,” Wilder utilizes scenes depicting the wonder of the world and the resulting sorrow when individuals recognize this too late. Saturating his works with the spirit of antiquity, Wilder exhorts us to observe lovingly and to live life fully while on earth. Through characters such as Dolly Levi in <i>The Matchmaker</i> and Emily Webb in <i>Our Town</i>, Wilder transforms Vergil’s <i> lacrimae rerum</i> into “Our Tears.”</p><p>
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Clopton, Kay Krystal. "Now Hear This: Onomatopoeia, Emanata, Gitaigo, Giongo – Sound Effects in North American Comics and Japanese Manga and How They Impact the Reading Experience." The Ohio State University, 2018. http://rave.ohiolink.edu/etdc/view?acc_num=osu1525744652209227.
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Adams, Melissa Marie. "New world courtship transatlantic fiction and the female American /." [Bloomington, Ind.] : Indiana University, 2009. http://gateway.proquest.com/openurl?url_ver=Z39.88-2004&rft_val_fmt=info:ofi/fmt:kev:mtx:dissertation&res_dat=xri:pqdiss&rft_dat=xri:pqdiss:3373489.
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Thesis (Ph.D.)--Indiana University, Dept. of English, 2009.<br>Source: Dissertation Abstracts International, Volume: 70-10, Section: A, page: 3850. Advisers: Jonathan Elmer; Deidre Lynch. Title from PDF t.p. (viewed on Jul 6, 2010).
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Gómez, Manuel Negrete. "La subconsciencia colectiva en la novela "Pedro Paramo"de Juan Rulfo." Diss., The University of Arizona, 2004. http://hdl.handle.net/10150/280547.
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The academic interest of this study is to establish the relevance and pertinence of Juan Rulfo's novel, Pedro Paramo, in the literary canon of western tradition. To accomplish our goal we will consider Rulfo's text in light of Carl Gustav Jung's analytical psychology, in particular the concepts of the archetypes and the collective unconscious, to demonstrate that the types and world presented in Rulfo's novel adhere to classical literary types of western tradition. We will use Jung's theory of the collective unconscious to show that what has been considered purely Mexican represents an extension of the themes and topics of interest in western tradition. To prove our point we will consider texts that are part of the literary canon of western tradition, such as: La epica de Gilgamesh; John Keats poem, "La Belle Dame Sans Merci"; Rainer Maria Rilke's poems, "Sonnets to Orpheus" and "Orpheus, Euridice, Hermes"; Ovidio's, La metamorfosis ; and Virgilio's Georgicas; as well as biblical selections in comparison and contrast to Rulfo's text. This study will establish that Juan Rulfo's work is an expression of the communal experience that concerns western literary tradition.
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Smith, Dorin. ""Strange American scion of the German trunk"| Charles Brockden Brown and the Americanization of the gothic novel." Thesis, California State University, Long Beach, 2014. http://pqdtopen.proquest.com/#viewpdf?dispub=1527344.
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<p> This thesis recontextualizes the politics of Charles Brockden Brown's gothic novels in terms of the literary development of Gothicism (Friedrich Schiller) and Romanticism (Friedrich Schlegel) in Germany. This recontextualization highlights the ways in which Brown's work is participating in a transatlantic conversation about the relation of epistemology and politics in art, while underscoring how Brown's use of the gothic addresses the vital issues of grounding democratic politics in the early republic. The argument is that between his earliest extant gothic novel and his later gothic novels Brown uses Schiller's model of the gothic tale and its appeal to methodologies of epistemological verification to support democratic politics. However, in the later novels, he disregards method and uses the state of uncertainty to articulate radical subjectivity as the basis of democratic politics—<i>pace</i> Schlegel's defense of democracy.</p>
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Murphy, Michael K. "Meaning through Action: William James’s Pragmatism in Novels by Larsen, Musil, and Hemingway." The Ohio State University, 2015. http://rave.ohiolink.edu/etdc/view?acc_num=osu1437662360.
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Leroux, Jean-François. "The Renaissance of impasse in American/Quebec literary relations, comparative readings of Carlyle, Emerson, Melville, Aquin, Ducharme and Beaulieu." Thesis, National Library of Canada = Bibliothèque nationale du Canada, 2002. http://www.collectionscanada.ca/obj/s4/f2/dsk3/ftp05/NQ66165.pdf.
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Vondrak, Amy Margaret Edmunds Susan. "Strange things: Hemingway, Woolf, and the fetish (Ernest Hemingway, Virginia Woolf)." Related Electronic Resource: Current Research at SU : database of SU dissertations, recent titles available full text, 2003. http://wwwlib.umi.com/cr/syr/main.
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Lagapa, Jason S. "Inarticulate prayers: Irony and religion in late twentieth-century poetry." Diss., The University of Arizona, 2003. http://hdl.handle.net/10150/280295.
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Inarticulate Prayers: Irony and Religion in Late Twentieth-Century Poetry examines irony and its implications for religious belief within texts ranging from the New York School Poets to the Language Poets and, in Caribbean literature, within the poems of Derek Walcott and Kamau Brathwaite. Taking Jacques Derrida's distinction between deconstruction and negative theology as a point of departure, I argue that contemporary poets employ ironic language to articulate an ambivalent, and skeptical, system of belief. In "How to Avoid Speaking: Denials," Derrida contrasts his theory of differance--as a fundamentally negative and critical mode of inquiry--with negative theology, which ultimately affirms God's being after a process of negation. My study asserts that contemporary poets, in accord with principles of negative theology, engage in inarticulate, self-canceling and negative utterances that nevertheless affirm the possibility of belief and enlightenment. By postulating the affinity between contemporary poets and the apophatic tradition, I explain how the work of these poets, despite often being dismissed as arid exercises in poststructuralist thought, productively draws on linguistic theories and also advances beyond the "negativity" of such theories. Moreover, as it intervenes in recent debates over the absence of a spiritual dimension to contemporary poetry, my dissertation opens new perspectives through which to theorize postmodern literature. Demonstrating that experiments in language and form are driven by an ironic stance towards belief, authorship and literary tradition, Inarticulate Prayers ultimately redefines contemporary lyric and narrative poetry and asserts negation, inarticulateness, and contradiction as determining characteristics of postmodern writing.
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Guglietta-Possamai, Daniela. "The twists and turns of a timeless puppet: Violence and the translation and adaptation of Carlo Collodi's "Le avventure di Pinocchio"." Thesis, University of Ottawa (Canada), 2008. http://hdl.handle.net/10393/27783.
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This thesis explores two English translations of Carlo Collodi's Le avventure di Pinocchio (1883), one by British translator M. A. Murray in 1891 and the other by American translator Walter S. Cramp in 1904. It also examines Walt Disney's adaptation of Pinocchio (1940) for the screen, and in the process studies how the different English target cultures and systems have motivated and influenced translators' and adaptors' decisions and how, therefore, translations and adaptations are necessarily products of their environment. My approach is to focus specifically on moments of violence in Collodi's text, and use them as particularly 'hot' text situations from which to study the English translations. These translations are placed into and then analysed in regard to their respective reconstructed socio-cultural, literary and translation contexts. The norms governing the British and American translators' and American adaptor's respective versions provide some insight into the translators' and adaptor's approach to violence in children's literature and help identify possible reasons for the differences between the source and the target texts, and also between the different translations. Skopostheorie, Descriptive Translation Studies, polysystem theory and norm theory all play a role in the analyses.
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Bachmann, Rachel E. "Germans and Latin Americans trade places intercultural experience and writing against dictatorship /." [Bloomington, Ind.] : Indiana University, 2008. http://gateway.proquest.com/openurl?url_ver=Z39.88-2004&rft_val_fmt=info:ofi/fmt:kev:mtx:dissertation&res_dat=xri:pqdiss&rft_dat=xri:pqdiss:3344552.
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Thesis (Ph.D.)--Indiana University, Dept. of Germanic Studies, 2008.<br>Title from PDF t.p. (viewed on Oct 5, 2009). Source: Dissertation Abstracts International, Volume: 70-02, Section: A, page: 0575. Adviser: Marc Weiner.
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Arreguin-Bermudez, Antonio. "La intertextualidad en la novelistica de Sara Sefchovichy Luis Spota: Los escritores crean a su precursor, Dante." Diss., The University of Arizona, 2002. http://hdl.handle.net/10150/280022.
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Una de las claves importantes para entender el exito de la obra narrativa de Sara Sefchovich y Luis Spota (1925--1985) es el uso de otros textos que ellos emplean en su narrativa, o sea, de la intertextualidad y en particular, La divina comedia de Dante. En esta disertacion realizamos un estudio de intertextualidad en la novelistica de los escritores mexicanos Sara Sefchovich y Luis Spota. Nos concentramos especificamente en dos obras de Sefchovich y tres de Spota. Las novelas analizadas de Sefchovich son: Demasiado amor (1990) y La senora de los suenos (1993). Los textos analizados de Spota son: Murieron a mitad del rio (1949), Casi el paraiso (1956) y Paraiso 25 (1983). En el presente estudio analizamos los textos ya mencionados bajo la optica de la intertextualidad. Identificando primeramente sus paratextos y posteriormente nos concentramos a estudiar los elementos intertextuales que aparecen implicita y explicitamente en las novelas de Sefchovich y Spota. Este estudio no se realizado aun, al menos no en lo que se refiere a las ya mencionadas novelas de Sefchovich y Spota y constituye justamente la empresa en que se inscribe el presente estudio, no con la pretension de identificar la presencia de textos diversos solamente ni comentar que estos son los unicos y definitivos elementos intertextuales, sino con el modesto proposito de ver la presencia y las intenciones de esos textos y contribuir en su exploracion.
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Olsen, Thomas Grant. "Novel incest: Negotiating narrative paradox." Diss., The University of Arizona, 2000. http://hdl.handle.net/10150/289116.
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Novel Incest: Negotiating Narrative Paradox, investigates how representations of incest disrupt not only family relationships but narrative conventions as well. The conventions governing a narrative's structural movement from beginning to end are upset in ways that often mimic the destruction of family lineage that incest causes. Each narrative instance of incest marks reconsideration not only of Western kinship systems and, more recently, the discourse of bourgeois family structures, but also of specific aspects of the rhetoric of fiction. This history of family and narrative disruption is sketched in my analysis of such seemingly disparate texts as Daniel Defoe's Moll Flanders; Ford Madox Ford's The Good Soldier; John Barth's novels and non-fiction, including The End of the Road, The Floating Opera, The Sot-Weed Factor, Giles Goat-Boy, Lost in the Funhouse, The Friday Book, Further Fridays, LETTERS, Sabbatical, The Tidewater Tales, The Last Voyage of Somebody the Sailor, and Once Upon a Time ; David Lynch's films, including The Alphabet, The Grandmother, Eraserhead, The Elephant Man, Dune, Blue Velvet, and Wild at Heart, and the pornographic film series Taboo I--XVIII . My analysis focuses on author- and reader-centered interpretations and includes both formal and thematic analysis. Psychoanalytic and deconstructive reading strategies are employed to investigate the intersections formed between narrative, rhetoric, and desire. The common thread connecting these texts is their unraveling of conventions in order to restructure the possibilities for narrative fiction.
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Kim, Jungsoo. "Res videns the subject and vision in the plays of Samuel Beckett, Sam Shepard, and Harold Pinter /." [Bloomington, Ind.] : Indiana University, 2008. http://gateway.proquest.com/openurl?url_ver=Z39.88-2004&rft_val_fmt=info:ofi/fmt:kev:mtx:dissertation&res_dat=xri:pqdiss&rft_dat=xri:pqdiss:3331263.
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Thesis (Ph.D.)--Indiana University, Dept. of Comparative Literature, 2008.<br>Title from PDF t.p. (viewed on Jul 24, 2009). Source: Dissertation Abstracts International, Volume: 69-11, Section: A, page: 4322. Advisers: Claus Cluver; Angela Pao.
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Varon, Gonzalez Carlos. "Malos Tiempos Para La Lírica: Poesía Y Cancelación Del Espacio Público." Thesis, Harvard University, 2015. http://nrs.harvard.edu/urn-3:HUL.InstRepos:17463125.
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This dissertation studies the sociopolitical place of poetry in Transatlantic Hispanic culture within different crises of the public realm in the wake of the Spanish Civil War. It locates a tradition of authors who question autonomy as “integrity” or “wholeness” and who produce “broken”, “unfinished”, “absent” and “unimaginable” poems. The investigation of this trope helps discover how literature understands itself in relation to war, concentration camps, dictatorship, and post-dictatorship. Authors include: César Vallejo, María Zambrano, Max Aub, Gabriel Ferrater, and Roberto Bolaño.<br>Romance Languages and Literatures
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Marubbio, M. Elise 1963. "The edge of the abyss: Metamorphosis as reality in contemporary Native American literature." Thesis, The University of Arizona, 1993. http://hdl.handle.net/10150/291692.
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The edge of the abyss: Metamorphosis as reality in contemporary Native American literature, approaches the concept of metamorphosis from a metaphysical and philosophical perspective as a culturally defined reality. It focuses on the works of contemporary Native American writers: Leslie Silko, Scott Momaday, Gerald Vizenor, and Louise Erdrich, who address the metamorphic properties of Time and the metamorphic abilities of Man as a continuing link to the supernatural and natural worlds through stories which descend from a history of oral traditions. The Edge of the Abyss explores the use of language and stories as a cultural survival technique for the retention of tribal ideology and world view. It addresses the fine line which exists between Western and Native American concepts of reality in order to re-define metamorphosis within a cultural context. This thesis uses an interdisciplinary approach utilizing anthropological, sociological, shamanistic, literary, and cultural materials in a comparative analysis.
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Bell, Rebekah E. "Literature and the Enneagram: Applying the Ancient Typing System for New Perspectives on Classic Characters." Ohio Dominican University / OhioLINK, 2018. http://rave.ohiolink.edu/etdc/view?acc_num=odu1543838468862621.
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Phillips, Kathryn Bednarzik. "A comparative content analysis of illustrated African American children's literature published between 1900-1962 and 1963-1992." Full-text version available from OU Domain via ProQuest Digital Dissertations, 1995. http://catalog.hathitrust.org/api/volumes/oclc/35695362.html.
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Compton, Mary Katherine. "The Quest for Meaning in "The Waste Land" and "Sanctuary": A Comparative Study." W&M ScholarWorks, 1986. https://scholarworks.wm.edu/etd/1539625352.
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Arimitsu, Michio. "Black Notes on Asia| Composite Figurations of Asia in the African American Transcultural Imagination, 1923-2013." Thesis, Harvard University, 2014. http://pqdtopen.proquest.com/#viewpdf?dispub=3611509.
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<p> <i>Black Notes on Asia: Composite Figurations of Asia in the African American Transcultural Imagination, 1923-2013</i> sheds new light on the hitherto neglected engagements of African American writers and thinkers with various literary, cultural, and artistic traditions of Asia. Starting with a reevaluation of Lewis G. Alexander's transcultural remaking of haiku in 1923, this dissertation interrogates and revises the familiar interracial (read as "black-white") terms of the African American struggle for freedom and equality. While critics have long taken for granted these terms as the sine qua non of the African American literary imagination and practice, this dissertation demonstrates how authors like Alexander defied not only the implicit dichotomy of black-and-white but also the critical bias that represents African American literature as a nationally segregated tradition distinctly cut off from cultural sources beyond the border of the United States and made legible only within its narrowly racialized and racializing contexts. More specifically, <i> Black Notes on Asia</i> argues that the ruling conceptions of the so-called "Harlem Renaissance in black and white" and the reductive understanding of the Black Arts Movement as an uncomplicated, propagandistic expression of black nationalism, fail to pay due attention to their underlying multiracial/multicultural/transnational aesthetics and perspectives. In order to understand the full complexity and heterogeneity of the African American imagination from the beginning of the twentieth century to the present, it is necessary to account for cultural ebbs and flows, echoes and reverberations, beyond the United States, Europe and Africa, to include Asia. Rediscovering the hitherto overlooked traces and reflections of Asia within the African American imagination, this dissertation argues that Asia has provided numerous African American authors and intellectuals, canonized as well as forgotten, with additional or alternative cultural resources that liberated them from, or at least helped them destabilize, what they considered as the constraining racial and nationalist discourse of the United States. </p>
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El, Hosseiny Alya Hany. "Strange and Stranger(s)| Constructing Hybrid Modernity through a Reading of Latin American and Arabic Prose, 1880-1920." Thesis, New York University, 2018. http://pqdtopen.proquest.com/#viewpdf?dispub=10750849.
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<p> This dissertation examines the theme of strangeness in Arabic and Latin American literature between 1880 and 1920. Through analytical readings of novels and other prose fiction of the late-nineteenth and early-twentieth centuries, I show the salience of strangeness, alienation and estrangement as motifs in these works. In the first chapter of the dissertation, I examine earlier works of prose to provide context. In the second chapter, I focus on strangeness as manifested through sexual transgression. Finally, in the last chapter, I analyze narratives of physical estrangement, such as travel, urban alienation, and disconnect from nature. </p><p> In analyzing strangeness, I show its close relationship with modernity. Indeed, alienation is a hallmark of modernity, rising from a disconnect with one’s society and physical environment. Alienation and estrangement are also metaphorical ways of addressing the relationship with the Other, especially if that Other is a colonizer or ex-colonizer. Strangeness is therefore expressive of problematics of national identity, at a time of budding decolonization and post-colonial nation-building. </p><p> Finally, this dissertation shows how the early prose literature of the turn of the twentieth century, in Latin America and in the Arab world, has expressed essential anxieties of modernity, and set the course for the canonical works of the later twentieth century.</p><p>
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Kennedy, Robert Oran. ""And a soul in ev'ry stone"| The ludic natures of Pale Fire and Gravity's Rainbow." Thesis, The University of Utah, 2016. http://pqdtopen.proquest.com/#viewpdf?dispub=10001410.
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<p> The author argues that ecocriticism has overlooked important works of mid-20th-century American literature because of their unorthodox approaches to writing about nature. These unorthodox approaches revolve around the use of humor and play to formulate arguments about nature. The author argues that because ecocriticism as a political critique emphasizes ecological catastrophe, humor and ludic writing tend to get ignored in the critical discussion. The author expresses the desire to expand the conversation on ludic texts. The author argues that two texts with relatively little ecocritical attention, Thomas Pynchon’s <i>Gravity’s Rainbow</i> and Vladimir Nabokov’s <i>Pale Fire,</i> use the aesthetic theories of Friedrich Nietzsche to explain the role of the non-human in human civilization. </p><p> In the first chapter, Vladimir Nabokov’s <i>Pale Fire</i> is argued to be a novel that is about the natural source of human aesthetic production. The author synthesizes studies of the novel and argues that Nabokov’s novel, both in its language and form, valorizes mimesis as the source of all aesthetic production. Nabokov’s belief in some form of design is examined through mimicry, and is found to permeate the novel through structural and descriptive references to games and nature. Nabokov is found to be influenced by the theories of Friedrich Nietzsche, Johan Huizinga, and Walter Benjamin. Nabokov ultimately finds that the justification for the world is aesthetic, that nature is important to humans as the origin of all artistic impulses. </p><p> The second chapter reads Thomas Pynchon’s <i>Gravity’s Rainbow</i> through the many references to Nietzsche’s <i> Birth of Tragedy,</i> finding that the novel sets nature against civilization according to Nietzsche’s distinction between the Dionysian and the Apollonian. The author finds that the novel holds up the natural world as a counter-force to the capitalist impulse to control and exploit the natural and human worlds. The author examines how Pynchon uses Dionysian tropes like drunkenness, absurdity, music, and feelings of oneness in the novel in moments of resistance to the dominant order. </p><p> The conclusion suggests that the work of Friedrich Nietzsche ought to be examined as an influential source for modern views on the value of nature. </p>
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Dashiell, John C. "Time's Ungentle Tide: Disillusion, Isolation and Self-Mastery in Byron and Hemingway." W&M ScholarWorks, 1988. https://scholarworks.wm.edu/etd/1539625460.
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Donlon, David B. "Reconsidering Swinburne's Relation to Whitman." W&M ScholarWorks, 1999. https://scholarworks.wm.edu/etd/1539626221.
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Soares, Costa Maria do Carmo. "Gaston Miron et Manuel Bandeira: Une pragmatique de l'engagement." Thesis, University of Ottawa (Canada), 2003. http://hdl.handle.net/10393/28966.
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L'importance de l'oeuvre de Gaston Miron dans la littérature québecoise et celle de Manuel Bandeira dans la littérature brésilienne n'est plus a démontrer. Cependant, l'orientation qu'ont reçue ces oeuvres a été principalement de nature sémiotique et thématique. La présente étude vise a démontrer que par l'approche pragmatique---qui met en évidence les marques discursives pertinentes---la poésie se révèle porteuse d'un type d'engagement de nature socio-culturelle, comme chez le poète brésilien, ou politique, chez le poète québecois. Ainsi, la matérialité du discours, dont relèvent les ressources stylistico-rhétoriques (les déictiques, les pronoms personnels, les temps verbaux), ainsi que les éléments de l'oralite (la parataxe, l'ellipse et la repetition), manifestent une subjectivité sur le plan de l'énonciation discursive. En outre, ce plan est tissé par différents niveaux, que ce soit phonique, syntaxique, lexical, sémantique et rythmique; par la façon dont ils sont agencés, communique une plethore d'émotions, résultant en un éthos qui essaie de rejoindre le destinataire, de façon a susciter chez celui-ci une réaction et, par conséquent, une transformation culturelle et sociale.
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Mason, Sofia Sandina Maniscalco. "Testimonio as counter-propaganda : a comparative analysis of Latin-American women's testimonial literature." Thesis, University of Nottingham, 2014. http://eprints.nottingham.ac.uk/14199/.
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This thesis creates a gendered typology of women’s testimonio that foregrounds the Cold War context of the genre. This new perspective reveals that contrary to the assertions of some critics, the texts struggle to convey a unitary propagandic message. Rather, their prime purpose is to counter hegemonic discourse. Yet, far from being unliterary or impersonal, they impart much personal information using a diversity of stylistic devices. The testimonios challenge the profoundly gendered national security discourse of their own governments and the US. The argument that brutal counter-insurgency tactics, widespread incarceration and torture, were necessary to combat “communist-inspired” insurgency is invalidated by these testimonios which replace dichotomising and reductionist Cold War propaganda with accounts of the local, subjective and personal reasons for political involvement. The texts disclose the potentially traumatising lived consequences of US foreign policy and national security strategies to reveal their disproportionate and excessive nature. However, the testimonialistas’ sense of a greater purpose, collective identity and belonging to a wider community enables them to remain resilient in spite of adverse experiences. Despite their loyalty to utopian and egalitarian ideals, sexism from within leftist movements and governments is exposed and denounced by the female protagonists as patriarchal institutions, traditions and gendered identities are consistently undermined. Latin American women, as guerrilleras, organisers and members of peasant and indigenous communities, present themselves as defiant protagonists who, aside from the male-dominated master narratives of the superpowers, demonstrate the strength of their political agency, psychological resilience and ideological convictions.
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Nwosu, Maik. "The reinvention of meaning cultural imaginaries and the life of the sign /." Related electronic resource: Current Research at SU : database of SU dissertations, recent titles available full text, 2005. http://wwwlib.umi.com/cr/syr/main.
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Bolt, Julie Elizabeth. "Border pedagogy for democratic practice." Diss., The University of Arizona, 2003. http://hdl.handle.net/10150/289996.
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Border Pedagogy for Democratic Practice articulates a pedagogy that awakens a more nuanced political consciousness, a sense of empathy and agency about social justice, and an increased comfort with ambiguities, for both student and teacher. By combining a theory of border pedagogy (developed by Henry Giroux, Peter McLaren, Renato Rosaldo and others), with tenets from cultural studies, postcolonial literary theory and critical pedagogy/literacy, I argue for a new understanding in the way we teach diverse texts, an understanding that can be applied to the ongoing shifts in history and culture, and local and global politics. The first section historicizes, explores and synthesizes the major theorists and questions from which my framework arises. In the second chapter I analyze the border texts of Sherman Alexie, Rigoberta Menchu, and Guillermo Gomez-Pena, which I find useful in classroom exploration of border theory. In the final section, I offer models of courses each designed with the intent of facilitating an environment for critical literacy, political agency and "border thought," including the courses "Contemporary American Indian Literature," "Critical Thinking" and "The Arts in Society." My hope is that border pedagogy for democratic practice will encourage active citizenship in the interest of social justice.
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Barry, Douglas. "Echoes of Laocoön's Warning in Letters from an American Farmer." ScholarWorks@UNO, 2011. http://scholarworks.uno.edu/td/1293.
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A dramatic shift in tone in the final letter of J. Hector St. John de Crèvecoeur's Letters from an American Farmer reveals Farmer James' conflicting attitudes about an independent America. When the letters are juxtaposed with a Western myth of origin such as Virgil's Aeneid, it becomes clear that Crèvecoeur is forcing his narrating persona to repeat a pattern of civilization – destruction, renewal – on which all of Western civilization is based. The sudden pessimism that erupts in the penultimate "Distresses of a Frontier Man" is symptomatic of James' anxiety about the American Revolution and the resulting disruption in his bucolic way of life.
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Pierce, Linda M. "Displaced memory: Oscar Micheaux, Carlos Bulosan, and the process of United States decolonization." Diss., The University of Arizona, 2004. http://hdl.handle.net/10150/280790.
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"Displaced Memory: Oscar Micheaux, Carlos Bulosan, and the Process of U.S. Decolonization," uses new applications for existing colonial and postcolonial theories in order to explain common incongruities in ethnic minority autobiographies in early twentieth-century America. Using Carlos Bulosan (1914-1956) and Oscar Micheaux's (1894-1951) "fictional autobiographies" as case studies, I argue that the seemingly contradictory coexistence of assimilationist and subversive narratives can be explained when understood as textual representations of the process of decolonization. Reading these narrators as postcolonial subjects, however, would require both a radical rethinking of colonial and postcolonial theory and careful revaluation of early American mythology. While recognizing the United States as a former (or neo-) colonial power poses no insuperable problem for scholars in Philippine American studies, analyzing other disenfranchised ethnic communities in terms of a U.S. colonial context is more problematic. My project addresses precisely this problem: part one begins with the Philippine context and asks why even this overt example of colonization remains unacknowledged within U.S. cultural memory. The answer to this question is grounded in the literary, political and ideological national foundations emergent during nascent U.S. development. In the second part of my project, I stress the necessity of comparing multi-ethnic experiences within parallel historical trajectories, addressing questions about how a U.S. postcolonial theory would become complicated when applied to slavery and its aftermath. I argue that the unique position of displaced colonials occupied by African slaves and the colonial memory instilled in their offspring suggest the applicability of postcolonial theory to the African American community. Questions of U.S. postcoloniality are invariably tethered to multiple perspectives from early literature, from captivity to emancipation and reconstruction. Thus, understanding the ways in which African Americans have been colonized is important not only for re-reading African American literature like that of Micheaux, but for revising American ideological holdovers from the seventeenth century to the present. Read together within the postcolonial context, Bulosan's and Micheaux's views on nation, race, masculinity and women take on new significance.
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Sutassi, Smuthkochorn Renner Stanley W. "Postmodernism and comparative mythology toward postimperialist English literary studies in the Thailand /." Normal, Ill. Illinois State University, 1996. http://wwwlib.umi.com/cr/ilstu/fullcit?p9721398.
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Thesis (D.A.)--Illinois State University, 1996.<br>Title from title page screen, viewed May 26, 2006. Dissertation Committee: Stanley W. Renner (chair), Ronald Strickland, William W. Morgan, Jr. Includes bibliographical references (leaves 140-146) and abstract. Also available in print.
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Leuschner, Eric D. "Prefacing fictions : a history of prefaces to British and American novels /." free to MU campus, to others for purchase, 2004. http://wwwlib.umi.com/cr/mo/fullcit?p3144435.
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Quatro, Jamie Jacqueline. "Postcolonial Parodies of the Creation Story in Olive Schreiner and Wilson Harris." W&M ScholarWorks, 1999. https://scholarworks.wm.edu/etd/1539626223.
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Sauble-Otto, Lorie Gwen. "Writing in subversive space: Language and the body in feminist science fiction in French and English." Diss., The University of Arizona, 2001. http://hdl.handle.net/10150/279786.
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This dissertation examines the themes of subversive language and representations of the body in an eclectic selection of feminist science fiction texts in French and English from a French materialist feminist point of view. The goal of this project is to bring together the theories of French materialist feminism and the theories and fictions of feminist science fiction. Chapter One of this dissertation seeks to clarify the main concepts that form the ideological core of French materialist feminism. Theoretical writings by Monique Wittig, Christine Delphy, Colette Guillaumin, Nicole-Claude Mathieu provide the methodological base for an analysis of the oppression of women. Works by American author Suzy McKee Charnas and Quebecois author Elisabeth Vonarburg provide fictional representations of what Wittig calls "the category of sex". Imagery that destabilizes our notions about sex is studied in Angela Carter's The Passion of New Eve. French materialist feminism maintains that the oppression of women consists of an economical exploitation and a physical appropriation. The second chapter of this dissertation looks at images of women working and images of (re)production in science fiction by Quebecois authors Esher Rochon, Louky Bersianik, Elisabeth Vonarburg, and American authors Ursula Le Guin, Joanna Russ, Marge Piercy, James Tiptree, Jr., Suzy McKee Charnas and Octavia Butler. The third chapter examines the theme of justified anger, as expressed in feminist science fiction, when women become aware of their own oppression. In addition to authors already mentioned above, I take examples from works in English by Kit Reed & Suzette Haden Elgin, and in French, by Marie Darrieussecq, Joelle Wintrebert and Jacqueline Harpman. Chapter Four seeks to show the importance of the act of writing and producing a text as a recurring theme in feminist science fiction. Highlighted examples from works by many authors including Elisabeth Vonarburg and Suzette Haden Elgin are representational of what Wittig calls "the mark of gender", the use of pronouns, marked speech and linguistic experimentation and invention.
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Moudry, Nick. "A Foreign Mirror: Intertexts with Surrealism in Twentieth-Century U. S. Poetries." Diss., Temple University Libraries, 2012. http://cdm16002.contentdm.oclc.org/cdm/ref/collection/p245801coll10/id/202600.
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English<br>Ph.D.<br>In the latter half of the twentieth-century, fewer U. S. poets translated foreign poetry than their modernist predecessors. The scope of their translation projects correspondingly narrowed. Gone, for example, were projects like Ezra Pound's reaching back to thirteenth-century Italy to see how U. S. poets could push forward. Instead, translations of European and Latin American modernism prevailed. Often, multiple translations of the same author were produced by different translators at the expense of presenting a more well-rounded vision of national literatures. Of these translations, a surprisingly large number were of poets who were either loosely or explicitly connected to surrealism as a literary movement. This dissertation locates this explosion of interest in surrealism as an attraction to the surrealist emphasis on reconciling binaries. This emphasis allows American poets a convenient frame through which to confront the difficult questions of place and nation that arise as the U. S. position in the field of world literature shifts from periphery to core. Previous researchers have traced the history of surrealism's early reception in the United States, but these studies tend to not only focus on the movement's influence on American art, but also stop shortly after surrealist expatriates returned to Europe following WWII. This dissertation extends these approaches both by bringing the conversation up to the present and by examining the key role that translation and other forms of rewriting play in mediating the relationship between surrealism and American audiences. As surrealism enters the U. S. literary system, the transformed product is often not what one might expect. U. S. rewritings of surrealist literature are primarily carried out by poets and critics whose fundamental interest in the movement lies in finding a foreign mirror for their own aesthetic or ideological preoccupations. This in turn provokes the development of a strand of surrealist-influenced writing whose aims and goals are vastly different from those of the movement's founders.<br>Temple University--Theses
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Kensky, Eitan Lev. "Facing the Limits of Fiction: Self-Consciousness in Jewish American Literature." Thesis, Harvard University, 2013. http://dissertations.umi.com/gsas.harvard:10716.
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This thesis explores the limits of fictional language by studying the work of Jewish American writer-critics, novelists who significantly engaged with literary criticism, and critics who experimented with the novel or short fiction. These writer-critics all believed in Literature: they believed that literature could effect social change and educate the masses; or they believed in literature as an art-form, one that exposed the myths underlying American society, or that revealed something fundamental about the human condition. Yet it is because they believed so stridently in the concept of Literature that they turned to non-fiction. Writing fiction exposed problems that Literature could not resolve. They describe being haunted by “preoccupations” that they could not exhaust in fiction alone. They apologetically refer to their critical texts as “by-products” of their creative writing. Writer-critics were forced to decide what the limits of fiction were, and they adopted other types of writing to supplement these unexpected gaps in fiction's power. This dissertation contains four chapters and an introduction. The introduction establishes the methodological difficulties in writing about author-critics, and introduces a set of principles to guide the study. Chapter 1 approaches Abraham Cahan's The Rise of David Levinsky (1917). I argue that many of the novel's difficulties result from Cahan's desire to present the way that ideology shades our understanding of reality while minimizing direct narratorial intrusions. Chapter 2 studies how politics affected the work of Mike Gold, Moishe Nadir, and Isaac Bashevis Singer. In all three writers, literature emerges as a kind of ersatz-politics, a space for the dispossessed to imagine the political. In the end, the political novel only reinforces the fictionality. Chapter 3 is a study of Leslie Fiedler's problematic novel, The Second Stone. While critics have seen the novel as a kind of game, I propose reading the novel as an earnest expression of Fiedler's vision of literature as a conversation. Chapter 4 turns to Cynthia Ozick and Susan Sontag. A cumulative reading of their fiction and criticism shows the deep twinning of their fiction and critical thought. For both writers true knowledge comes only through the imagination.<br>Near Eastern Languages and Civilizations
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Kennon, Raquel. "Transforming Trauma: Memory and Slavery in Black Atlantic Literature since 1830." Thesis, Harvard University, 2012. http://dissertations.umi.com/gsas.harvard:10396.
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Transforming Trauma: Memory and Slavery in Black Atlantic Literature since 1830 examines the interplay between remembering and forgetting in literary and cultural engagements with the trauma of transatlantic slavery. The dissertation considers how intergenerational, trans-temporal trauma becomes re-narrativized and re-envisioned over time in four symbolic sites of slavery (five countries)—Africa (Ghana and Mozambique), the Caribbean (Cuba), Brazil, and the United States—with the goal of exposing differences and emphasizing ruptures. Each chapter functions like a slave schooner arriving at an outpost of the African Diaspora, touring an eclectic transatlantic archive of slavery including art, public space, newspaper clippings, telenovelas, monuments (both imagined and built), song, and advertising copy, then dropping an anchor to explore a more traditional cross section of literature from each national context, juxtaposing canonical and non-canonical works. Taken together, the chapters probe the ways nineteenth and twentieth century Inter-American and African “texts,” broadly defined, register the trauma of slavery in the Black Atlantic. Chapter 1 discusses Brazilian author Bernardo Guimarães’ short novel, A Escrava Isaura (1875) and its wildly popular telenovela adaption in 1976 as an example of one of slavery’s twentieth century kitsch manifestations. The theme of Exodus in African American literature is considered in chapter 2 with a reading of Frances E.W. Harper’s 1869 poem, “Moses,” followed by an extended exploration of the early twentieth century Mammy cult including the 1922 statue proposal. Chapter 3 explores scenes of racial violence and offers a reading of the horrific American ritual of lynching in Jean Toomer’s “Kabnis” and “Portrait in Georgia” in Cane (1923) followed by textual analysis of Robert Hayden’s “Middle Passage” (1962, 1966). Chapter 4 focuses on the Brazilian collective memory of the old historic district of Pelourinho in Salvador, Bahia as the former site of punishment at the pillory (whipping post) for enslaved Africans. Close readings in this chapter include Castro Alves’s classic epic poem, “O navio negreiro” from Os Escravos (1883) and Carolina Maria de Jesus’s diary of favela life, O Quarto de Despejo (1960) in addition to shorter readings of the poetry of Alzira Rufino, Esmeralda Ribeiro, Francisco Alvim, and a short novel by Dudda Seixas. Chapter 5 engages with the charged metaphor of sugar and compares the only extant nineteenth century Cuban slave narrative, Juan Francisco Manzano’s Autobiografía de un esclavo (1839) with a twentieth century account of maroon Esteban Montejo’s slave narrative as related to anthropologist/writer Miguel Barnet in Cimarrón: Historia de un esclavo (1966). The final chapter addresses the so-called literary African amnesia around slavery and examines vestiges of the memory of slavery in three African texts: Noémia de Sousa’s “Negra” (1949), Ama Ata Aidoo’s The Dilemma of a Ghost (1965), and Ayi Kwei Armah’s Two Thousand Seasons (1973).